Many industrial activities require the use of earth moving machines, material lifting and handling machines, and other large machines. In order to enhance operator safety and productivity while reducing operator fatigue, the operation of such machines is increasingly automated and/or executed via remote control (RC). In this way, an operator may monitor and control a machine from the safety and quiet of an operator center rather than spending the work day in the cab of the machine itself.
It is possible for a single operator to monitor multiple remote machines at once via a remote vision system that displays video from each machine to the operator at a remote operator center. Such systems allow for more efficient monitoring due to consolidation of video information in a single location. However, the amount of data available from any one machine is such that for a large number of machines, an operator may be challenged to quickly identify video displays that represent a higher priority for monitoring and/or control.
One attempt to prioritize machine information entails limiting the visual display to a simpler form, e.g., icons rather than video. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,898,403, entitled “Detecting construction equipment process failure” (Ritter et al.) describes a system wherein icons are displayed to an operator to represent various machines, and the icons are color-coded to represent various degrees of urgency. See '403 patent at col. 26, ll. 20-44 (“The client 1210's display 1220 can be used for displaying a visual representation of a construction site and visual representations of the assets that are being used on that construction site. The visual representation of the construction site may be a map of the construction site. The visual representations of assets may be icons . . . . For example a visual representation of a service truck may look like a service truck . . . . [T]he visual representation of an asset may change colors in order to display status information 1252 about that asset . . . [T]he color of the entire visual representation may be changed or a part of the visual representation may be changed.”)
However, in the context of remote machine control, and of remote vision systems for such remote control, systems like that of the '403 patent, by virtue of their imprecise presentation, do not provide sufficient information to precisely control a machine. As such, while such a system may convey an alert, it does not allow for precise machine remote control The present disclosure is directed at least in part to a system that may address the needs discussed or implied above. However, it should be appreciated that the solution of any particular problem is not a limitation on the scope of this disclosure nor of the attached claims except to the extent expressly noted. Additionally, the inclusion of material in this Background section is not an indication that the material represents known prior art other than the patent specifically identified above. With respect to such identified prior art, the foregoing characterization is not itself prior art but is simply a brief summary for the sake of reader convenience. The interested reader is referred to the identified patent itself for a more accurate understanding.